These Obama cultists you keep railing about? They live in your head.
I don’t really consider this a scandal any more than trying to close down a torture dungeon started by our last president to be a failing on Obama’s part. This is what the NSA does, this power is what the Patriot Act gives to the executive branch. Maybe the GOP, in order to stop this, will stop renewing the PA unanimously each time it comes up
Poor timing, too. They shoulda saved it all for October 2014.
And not in his alone . . .
I couldn’t have said it better myself. People need to remember that whenever their guy pushes to expand his powers, the next guy, who they might not like, will also have those new expanded powers. And, is likely to use them in ways that you don’t like. The whole point of civil liberties is that they protect people that those in power don’t like.
Oh oh oh! Let me be Warren G Harding, I’ll be the worst rapping president ever!
That bastion of conservative thought, the New York Times, seems to think its important enough not to hand wave it away. Go figure.
Alsothisis now being reported.
Again you can hand wave it away as starting with Bush but its been happening longer under Obama and expanding since he took office. But this room is a little warm so keep waving.
If conservatives, especially politicians and the media, showed any evidence of not liking these policies as policies, and not just because the current President is the one using them, this thread probably wouldn’t exist (or at least be a LOT weaker).
Hell, if that happened, the policies themselves probably wouldn’t exist.
When is the last time you could say Congress (or at least a majority of it) understood this? FISA?
Nobody’s trying to “hand wave away” the pernicious nature of the surveillance program. Yes, we all agree (except Bricker and Sun Jester, I think) that this is a bad thing.
What we’re contemptuous of is the transparently self-serving efforts to present it as a scandal, i.e., some secret nefariousness that’s suddenly been exposed. The conservatives who saw this whole thing put into place under Bush and didn’t bat an eyelash, and are now all of a sudden shocked, shocked! that Obama has permitted it to continue, are a bunch of hypocritical shitflingers.
By all means, let’s rally round for civil liberties and stop this unethical surveillance with a public outcry against it. But I somehow doubt that these shitflinging conservatives actually want to stop the surveillance if they can just go on blaming Obama for it instead.
If that happened, I’d certainly be ready to make common cause with them to repeal the laws making these policies legal.
And I expect that to happen by the next time Thanksgiving in the U.S. falls on a Monday.
Am I the only one - the ONLY ONE - in this thread that realizes this “scandal” was broken by a British, leftist newspaper? And am I the ONLY ONE aware that both sides of the aisle have said “Yeah? So what?” The only people bitching are uninformed citizens and Congressmen who think they should get more oversight (read: power) over it. The only complaining going on is not R vs. D, but Congress vs. White House, who both can’t really say anything because they were both aware of it.
So let’s stop with the “Oh geez, Conservatives are at it again!” schtick.
Show me evidence that politicians on either side show serious reservations about it, period. One or two Congressional nobodies don’t count. Show me a chairman or party leader. Chambliss and Feinstein have joined the White House in support of the program. At best, you’ve got Boehner saying Congress should have more oversight…that’s about it.
Well they had to pass it to know what was in it.
More precisely, there are two categories of people complaining about this: those who have been bitching about the program all along (like the not-exactly-uninformed American Civil Liberties Union, who’ve been against this measure from day zero), and those who have started bitching about it now that they think it’s a stick to beat Obama with.
If opposition from the left cannot affect the civil-liberties policies of a Democratic administration, why would one think that opposition from the right would have affected a Republican administration?
Would that those of us in the former camp could actually believe that any action will come out of this through a temporary alliance with the latter camp. It’s a nice thought, to be sure, much like the thought of a fat-loss, muscle-building ice cream (which they’ll pay you to eat!) is a nice thought. But at this point, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The American people have spoken through their silence these past twelve years: Civil liberties are unimportant. Government secrecy is just fine, if you can find a tenuous link to protecting against terrorism. It’s utterly despicable, if you think about the sacrifice of values we have made, but as long as both of our major political parties agree on this issue (and make no mistake, they do), we’re stuck with this odious idea that safety is more virtuous than democracy.
I wish this “scandal” would change things for the better. I very, very much doubt it will.
Enough of the fucking scandal-mongering.
This is not new. They’ve been doing this sort of thing since the 80’s at the very latest, and I knew about it then.
Yes, but just imagine how much worse things would have been if we hadn’t DONE SOMETHING. Therefore we must continue DOING SOMETHING, or better yet, DOING EVEN MORE. It’s for the children, doncha know. :rolleyes: